Elephant the movie Essay -- essays research papers

Gus Van Sants Elephant was at erstwhile critically praised and denounced by both flash reviewers and filmgoers alike. The cinematography takes you on a waltz throughout a seemingly typical day at an unnamed proud school, stopping through the journey to focus on the stereotypes of school. The jock, the quirky artist, the cliqued girls, the skateboarder, they are all represented and representative of his film. Van Sant fabricated a film, seemingly without a staunch opinion on the horrors of the Columbine shootings. The delineation seems di stanced from the actors and their actions an unaware participant from the tranquil introduction to the gruesome climax. His seeming lack of a draw a bead on, lack of a reason for the creation of this film, is exactly the whim that drives its core meaning. The high school was as stereotyped and typical as possible, a campus where everyone swears theyve visited once in their life. The visceral climax is at once both slowly built up to inevitab ility by the characterizations of the assailants, except it also strikes the school suddenly and without warning. Van Sants film is a series of seeming contradictions and paradoxes that create the illusion that he has no stance on the Columbine shootings. His stance, however, is given away in the purposelessness of the film the idyllic simplicity of the school, and its subsequent destruction, has no purpose. The Columbine massacre had no purpose. Gus Van Sants estheticalized school builds up a being that seems overt to most students. He carries every right to create his own world and tear it back down. It is this beauty that he creates that makes the film so such(prenominal) more shocking when it ends. Aesthetic realism is the concept of accepting human beings as unchangeable on that pointfore, one must find the beauty that is inborn in everyday life instead of attempting to create beauty. The idea is that aesthetic realism sees all reality including the reality that is ones elf, as the aesthetic ace of opposites, (Siegel). In other words, life is at once changing and the aforementioned(prenominal). For example, individual is the corresponding person when they wake up in the morning and the same person when they go to sleep at night. They havent changed. However, there have still changed as a person throughout the day, at least minutely. Change and stability both occur simultaneously. At the same time, Siegel states that it sees the largest purpose o... ...e what can be easily related to they wouldnt be considered stereotypes otherwise. The beauty that is created during the first hour, which is denounced by Foundas as unrealistic, is subsequently destroyed in the climax. To create and destroy mediocrity would not be as inspiration a rendition as Van Sants recreation of nonpareil coupled with his systematic disposal of it. Gus Van Sant has created a world of high school that has every stereotype. He manifests a sense of beauty in every shot he crea tes, with the slow arcing camera shots combined with the pleasant caricatures of the students. He finds the aesthetic realism in high school, the elegance inbred in aspects of campus life, and constructs a film around it. It is his own right to create his own view of high school, and while critics can disagree, they should not debase. The initial purposelessness should only be taken at face nurture it is the lack of purpose in the beginning of the film that makes the lack of purpose in the massacre more obvious. There was no reasoning freighter the Columbine shootings, they were a tragic occurrence that had little logic buttocks it. However, Van Sants film had purpose underneath its exterior.